Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry, changes his meter

Heather Charles, Chicago Tribune

Heather Charles, Chicago Tribune

Heidi Stevens

In the first chapter of "My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer," a book Christian Wiman wrote in the wake of a bone marrow transplant to treat his incurable blood cancer, he introduces us to his longings.

"What I crave at this point in my life," he writes, "is to speak more clearly what it is that I believe."

It's a prelude to the coming chapters, in both his book and his life. "My Bright Abyss" is a collection of essays that explore Wiman's spiritual journey, from a child raised Southern Baptist in West Texas to a young adult who rejected the trappings of religion to a man who, now, contemplating a life likely to be cut far too short, is filled with an all-consuming belief in the God he says he always sensed, even during the years he spent doubting.

"Whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it," Wiman writes. "For faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life — which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change."

Wiman's book, released this month, is reaching readers just as word spreads of great change set in motion by his pending departure from Poetry, the Chicago-based magazine that he has helmed since 2003, and, by all accounts, elevated to its finest hour. The magazine, founded in 1912, garnered two National Magazine Awards and more than doubled its circulation during his leadership.

"Poetry magazine became the primary place I would like for my work to be published while he was editor," says Kay Ryan, the U.S. poet laureate from 2008 to 2010, whose 2010 book "The Best of It: New and Selected Poems" won the Pulitzer Prize.

The Poetry Foundation, established in 2003 after philanthropist Ruth Lilly bestowed a $200 million gift to the magazine, operates as an independent literary organization whose mission is to cultivate and celebrate poetry. The foundation used the money to establish an endowment to fund Poetry magazine in perpetuity.

"Poetry is our oldest and most deeply respected poetry magazine in the country, and it's always meant a great deal to me," Ryan says. "But it became what it is today because of the direction of (Wiman's) editorial hand."

"He complete revitalized it," says Poetry senior editor Don Share. "He put it right back into the conversation that it was designed to be a part of and managed to make it into the most successful version of itself in its 100-year history."

Wiman, who remains in the editor's post until June 30, will join the faculty at the Yale Divinity School in July. Yale approached him about teaching for a semester after he delivered a lecture there in 2011. But complications from the cancer with which he was diagnosed on his 39th birthday in 2005 prevented him from accepting the offer.

He remained in contact with the school and eventually worked with the administration to create a new position within the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

"I'll be teaching poetry and faith this fall," he says. "Using poems to look at issues of faith through all centuries, in all countries, looking at all kinds of faith. And then next semester I'll be teaching on accidental theologians; people doing theology through other means — novels or poems or journals or essays or nonfiction."

Speaking more clearly, that is, about what it is that he believes.

"I'm tremendously excited about the prospect of being able to talk about poetry and faith," he says. "I find I have to squelch that side of the poem in order to get people to listen if I'm at decidedly secular institutions. They're not used to talking about poems as expressions of faith, even when you're talking about devotional poems. You can talk about any kind of meaning in a poem. You can talk about cross-dressing in Hamlet. But if you want to talk about the Christian implications in Hamlet, you're screwed. You lose half your audience."

"In the final analysis," he says, "it was very obvious what the right choice was, which was to take this job. There's a kind of fatedness to it, like my whole life has been aiming at this job."

Share senses the same such fatedeness for his longtime colleague and friend. "He'll get to think and study and meditate on things that are important to him and communicate with a different group of people, rather than being surrounded by poets all the time — which, after 10 years, might make somebody quite crazy," Share says.

"He brings a kind of energy to these conversations and these questions of faith that are quite unusual," he says. "Usually you find someone who sticks to one end of that conversation or the other, but he fuses them together so naturally that it makes a perfect kind of emotional sense."

Nonetheless, Share feels Wiman's departure as a deeply personal loss. "I'm very sad," Share says. "It has been a profound experience to know him and work with him. It's almost impossible to explain how much he means to me. My life would never have been the same if I hadn't met him, and it was an inspiration every day to think about the work we did together and the way he made it happen.

"I learned a lot and I was moved a lot and I can tell you, in a more prosaic way, we co-edited this magazine every day for 10 years and we never had an argument. We didn't agree on everything, and our ideas and tastes were very different, but he has a kind of grace and seriousness that meant there was never going to be any kind of yelling or drama on the job."

Wiman is held in similar esteem by the writers whose work he commissioned. "He's been very supportive of me and my work during his tenure, and some of the success I've enjoyed is because of his support," says Ryan. "And I'm one of many writers who can say that. That's what an important magazine does and a fine editor does. Writers' lives are redirected by editors."

Poetry founder Harriet Monroe, herself a poet and critic, founded the magazine with an "open door" commitment for which the magazine came to be known. "Open Door will be the policy of this magazine," read a note in the magazine's second issue. "May the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors ... desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written."

Wiman made a point to uphold that mission.

"He has been very attentive to new writers, and he has encouraged wonderful writers and really brought them to the attention of the American poetry readership," says Ryan. "He's paid attention to writers who weren't getting enough recognition and has featured them and has really changed the course of their careers in doing so.

"These are giant things," she says. "They change the landscape."

Poet A.E. Stallings, who lives in Greece, emailed of Wiman: "One of the things I noticed right away was his actively soliciting prose of various kinds, even from people who didn't tend to write a lot of it. And he was active, too, in soliciting reviews and criticism from women poets, many of whom, such as myself, didn't necessarily think of ourselves as critics."

"He was quite demanding too," she writes. "The first prose piece he solicited from me was a bit lackluster, and rather than even ask (that) I revise it, he just offered me a kill fee. Chris' candor is part of what makes him such a gem. If something is subpar, I know he'll tell me."

Stallings recalls a sense of unease settling over the poetry world when, shortly after Wiman took over as editor, the magazine received the Lilly gift.

"Nobody knew what all that money was going to do to the magazine," she writes. "It could have been harmful. The magazine could have become just a byproduct of the foundation. Under his editorship, the magazine has not only survived as a magazine of importance, it has thrived, and is at the center of all kinds of conversations and controversies.

"Chris, Don and the others have been faithful to the open door policy. It's a good sign that in any issue, there will be poems you love, poems that bother you and poems you just don't get."

Will that remain the case at a post-Wiman Poetry? No one can say for sure, of course.

A national search is underway for his replacement. Share has thrown his hat in the ring. Wiman says he is not involved in the selection.

"I would like to think that in the same way he brought his whole self to it and made it what it is and worked to make it consistently excellent in one way, there would be another way to do that too," says Ryan. "If there's a Chris, there's the next Chris. It can find another shape. It won't be the same and it can't be the same and it shouldn't be."

Which is fine with Wiman.

"I hope someone changes it all around and has a different vision," he says. "I would like somebody to have a lot of new ideas for how to do it."

(His particular type of cancer, Waldenström's macroglobulinemia, is extremely rare and unpredictable. "Some people die quickly, some people live 30 years with it," he told Bill Moyers in an interview last year.)

The next few months will be spent selling his Albany Park home and moving his wife and twin 3-year-old daughters to New Haven, Conn., where he'll continue his search for answers to the questions of faith that loom largest in his world.

"I have come to realize," he writes in "My Bright Abyss," "that the real question — the real difficulty — is how, not what. How do you answer that burn of being? What might it mean for your life — and for your death — to acknowledge that insistent, persistent ghost?"

And so begins the next chapter. Which, he says, will include much writing.

"Chris might be better known at this point for his stimulating and controversial essays," writes Stallings. "Especially on religion, which seems to be the last taboo of academia. "But his poems are going to last. His poems are both informed by form while carving out their own territory, muscular and musical, as a river is both contained by and carves out its own banks. They lodge in the memory, too. I read them, and they challenge me to be more ambitious, to write better. I know I am reading a terrific poem when the main emotion that comes over me is envy."